In a typical cloud-based data center, a large collection of interconnected servers provides computing and/or storage capacity for execution of various applications. For example, a data center may comprise a facility that hosts applications and services for subscribers, i.e., customers of a data center. The data center may, for example, host all of the infrastructure equipment, such as networking and storage systems, redundant power supplies, and environmental controls. In most data centers, clusters of storage systems and application servers are interconnected via high-speed switch fabric provided by one or more tiers of physical network switches and routers. More sophisticated data centers provide infrastructure spread throughout the world with subscriber support equipment located in various physical hosting facilities.
Moreover, customer equipment within each data center may be virtually isolated onto a respective Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN). That is, the routing and switching devices of a data center provide an underlay network that transports layer two (L2) communications for customer networks through a respective VXLAN overlay network for each customer. That is, VXLAN overlay networks are designated for each customer network and operated over the existing LAN infrastructure of the data center.
In VXLAN-based networks, multicast technologies are used for carrying unknown destination, broadcast, and multicast frames. As such, use of VXLANs tends to rely on other multicast protocols executing within the data center, such as the Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) protocol, for establishing tunnels for communicating customer data traffic through the data center.